Fashion and Materialism

252 Pages·2018·10.464 MB·English

by  Ulrich Lehmann

Series editors:
John Armitage Fashion and
Ryan Bishop
Joanne Roberts
Materialism
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‘Examining the persistence of the Cold War’s massive restructuring of our lifeworld, this h
fascinating collection provides a series of incisive case studies that explores key sites of i
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interaction between politics, technoscience and various modalities of cultural production
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since the mid-twentieth century. Taken together, these interlinked microhistories provide

both a powerful demonstration of the book’s central thesis regarding the Cold War – the a
degree to which, even “after”, we continue to live within it – and an important resource for n
the challenge of thinking beyond its legacies.’ d
Mark Dorrian, Forbes Chair in Architecture, University of Edinburgh M
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Reveals how the twenty-first century is the world
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the Cold War made
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What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a
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number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by i
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theories, technologies and attitudes that were forged during World War II and developed m
into organisational structures during the long Cold War.
From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and
surveillance technologies to smart weapons systems and contemporary fiction and art,
this book shows that we are now living in a world imagined and engineered during the
Cold War.
Drawing on theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Luce
Irigaray, Friedrich Kittler, Michel Serres, Peter Sloterdijk, Carl Schmitt, Bernard Stiegler and
Paul Virilio, this collection makes connections between Cold War material and conceptual
technologies as they relate to the arts, society and culture.
John Beck is Professor of Modern Literature and Director of the Institute for Modern and
Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, London. Ryan Bishop is Professor U
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of Global Art and Politics at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. ri
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Ulrich Lehmann
Cover image: Ability-Composite, 2015 © Jordan Crandall
Cover design: first pulse design
1313 eup Lehmann_PPC.indd 2 29/05/2017 21:07
Fashion and Materialism
Technicities
Series Editors: John Armitage, Ryan Bishop and Joanne Roberts,
Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton
The philosophy of technicities: exploring how technology mediates
art, frames design and augments the mediated collective perception of
everyday life.
Technicities will publish the latest philosophical thinking about our
increasingly immaterial technocultural conditions, with a unique focus on
the context of art, design and media.
Editorial Advisory Board
Benjamin Bratton, Cheryl Buckley, Sean Cubitt, Clive Dilnot, Jin Huimin,
Arthur Kroker, Geert Lovink, Scott McQuire, Gunalan Nadarajan, Elin
O’Hara Slavick, Li Shqiao, Geoffrey Winthrop-Young
Published
Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism,
Information and Art
By Ashley Woodward
Critical Luxury Studies: Art, Design, Media
Edited by John Armitage and Joanne Roberts
Cold War Legacies: Systems, Theory, Aesthetics
Edited by John Beck and Ryan Bishop
Fashion and Materialism
By Ulrich Lehmann
Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities
Edited by Rohit K. Dasgupta and Debanuj DasGupta
Forthcoming Titles
Zero Degree Seeing: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics
Edited by Ryan Bishop and Sunil Manghani
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/tech
Fashion and
Materialism
Ulrich Lehmann
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We
publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities
and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production
values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our
website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com
© Ulrich Lehmann, 2018
Edinburgh University Press Ltd
The Tun – Holyrood Road
12(2f) Jackson’s Entry
Edinburgh EH8 8PJ
Typeset in Adode Sabon by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire,
and printed and bound in Great Britain.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 4744 0791 5 (hardback)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0792 2 (webready PDF)
ISBN 978 1 4744 0793 9 (epub)
The right of Ulrich Lehmann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and
Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).
Contents
Series Editors’ Preface vi
Introduction 1
1 Production into Consumption: Materialism in Fashion 14
2 Historical Materialism and Historicism: The Tiger’s Leap 35
3 Sartorial Semantics: Le Mot dans la mode 69
4 Markets for Modernity: Salons, Galleries and Fashion 103
5 Structuralism and Materialism: The Language of a
Pur(e)Suit 129
6 Dialectics in C.C.P. 160
7 Primary Material 197
Conclusion 230
Select Bibliography 234
Index 240
Series Editors’ Preface
Technological transformation has profound and frequently unfore-
seen influences on art, design and media. At times technology eman-
cipates art and enriches the quality of design. Occasionally it causes
acute individual and collective problems of mediated perception.
Time after time technological change accomplishes both simultane-
ously. This new book series explores and reflects philosophically on
what new and emerging technicities do to our everyday lives and
increasingly immaterial technocultural conditions. Moving beyond
traditional conceptions of the philosophy of technology and of
techne, the series presents new philosophical thinking on how tech-
nology constantly alters the essential conditions of beauty, invention
and communication. From novel understandings of the world of
technicity to new interpretations of aesthetic value, graphics and
information, Technicities focuses on the relationships between criti-
cal theory and representation, the arts, broadcasting, print, techno-
logical genealogies/histories, material culture and digital technologies
and our philosophical views of the world of art, design and media.
The series foregrounds contemporary work in art, design and
media whilst remaining inclusive, both in terms of philosophical
perspectives on technology and interdisciplinary contributions. For a
philosophy of technicities is crucial to extant debates over the artistic,
inventive, and informational aspects of technology. The books in the
Technicities series concentrate on present-day and evolving techno-
logical advances but visual, design-led and mass-mediated questions
are emphasised to further our knowledge of their often-combined
means of digital transformation.
The editors of Technicities welcome proposals for monographs
and well-considered edited collections that establish new paths of
investigation.
John Armitage, Ryan Bishop and Joanne Roberts
Introduction
Man’s relations with himself have not been essentially transformed.
These relations have changed much less than man’s relation with
the external world, which has fallen increasingly under the control
of an ever powerful technicity . . . Therefore, transformative action
and radical critique have lagged behind the productive forces and the
possibilities for transformation they harbour, and they are deflected
from that goal.
Henri Lefebvre, 1959–611
This book posits fashion as a centre around which to explore positions
of materialism. Fashion is understood first as a system that promotes
the constant renewal of commodities and secondly, more specifically,
as an industry that produces textiles and garments. Materialism is
a focus on concrete, physical phenomena and on objects that are
produced by subjects. It therefore incorporates a concentration on
materiality, on the physical properties of things and how they are
represented and perceived by the acting subject. The material world,
that is, the world outside of consciousness, serves to found and deter-
mine thought. Materialism is understood further as a socio-economic
philosophy that is concerned with social conditions of production
and in particular with the relationship between labour and capital.
These two understandings of materialism are epistemologically, in
terms of the origin of knowledge, and historically contingent. In
the initial rejection of any metaphysical entity (world spirit, God,
etc.), mechanistic materialism, in particular during the eighteenth
century in France, had determined human development through an
interaction of physical forces, yet it had already applied this concept
to social interaction and political emancipation, albeit in theory not
in practice. An important feature of mechanistic materialism was
change, exemplified by an understanding of the material world as
particles of matter that are in constant interaction. This suggested
2 Fashion and materialism
already the usefulness of a dialectical method – reasoning by dynami-
cally incorporating contradictions and negation – for understanding
the distinction between static principles and movement, which would
animate dialectical and subsequently historical materialism.
From this historical point of origin and potentised in the political
impact of the French Revolution, the materialism of the start of the
nineteenth century aimed at understanding things concretely in all
their movements: social, political and economic, as well as in the
changing conditions of production, with elements of change and
interconnection determining the way in which people worked and
lived. Accordingly, the development of dialectical materialism was
not an abstract concept but a way to comprehend the concrete mani-
festations of reality, the material world as it presents itself in practice.
Karl Marx famously wrote on this shift from the mechanistic to
the dialectical: ‘The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism
[. . .] is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the
form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human
activity, practice, not subjectively.’2 Marx’s critique of subjectivity,
determined by his adopting G. W. F. Hegel’s integration of subject
into object – which is a topic of my sixth chapter – is one of the bases
for the discussion of ideas in this book.
Fashion has been seen as very subjective indeed, as expressed
mainly through individual designers, select brands, the endorsement
of certain celebrities or the (constantly changing) personal preference
of the wearer. This is by no means a contemporary manoeuvre by
the media; fashion’s subjectivity has existed in the vast majority of
historical accounts, theories of (decorative) art and even sociological
studies. Fashion is said to inspire subjective individualism because
the subject wants to distinguish her- or himself in relation to others,
in particular through attire, hairstyle and make-up. Even when his-
torians identify broad sweeps of sartorial movements or decorative
trends they almost always return them to the individual: the member
of a royal family, the dandy or style leader, the spouse or lover of
an industrialist – all of whom represent a new style (of consump-
tion) and are fêted for it. Collective movements or (politicised) class
preferences in fashion are routinely underplayed or ignored. Such
bias finds a parallel in the notion that the discourse of fashion,
especially in so-called ‘fashion studies’, prefers consumption to pro-
duction. In my view, this is due to the fact that the large majority of
fashion historians and theorists (let alone materialist philosophers or
political economists) display scant interest in the actual making of
clothes or other fashion objects; they are not visiting manufacturers
or studios but write their analyses based on the clothing that they see
Introduction 3
as a finished commodity represented in the media or on display in
shops. Yet this bias is also due to the sway that consumption theory
has held over material culture, cultural studies and their offspring
such as fashion studies. Since the 1980s Anglo-American academia
has touted the model of individual consumption – not production or
its conditions – as the (fashionable) approach to assessing artefacts.
Consumption theory and its variants in anthropology, sociology or
economics are firmly placed in the set economic structure of capital-
ism and are retroactively applied to fashion history across periods
and used to curate costumes in museums.3 They affirm a structure
that is already in place and thereby ignore the disruptive potential
that the production of new things can entail. The understanding of
history that is allied with the economic and discursive system of capi-
talism is essentially positivist: it assumes an idea of linear progress
that leads, through trickle-down effects and participation through
widening, conspicuous consumption, to a progressive ‘democratis-
ing’ of culture and fashion – which, in essence, is but a continuous
economic expansion of the culture industry. Disruptions, interven-
tions or repeat patterns of conflict and struggle are eschewed as
guiding principles for the positivist, individualist perception (of the
history) of fashion. Through alternative examples and the analysis
of a historical materialist method, this book proposes a different
understanding of the idea of fashion across a historical period in
Europe – from circa 1830 to today – that runs parallel with the
founding of the present fashion industry, modern textile production
and the formation of the culture industry.
Dialectical materialism as practice (in thought, in political action)
was extended in the nineteenth century to a wider epistemology,
historical materialism. Its interest rests on the agents of social change
and development and on concrete actions. Significantly, the method
of historical materialism determines patterns and structures from
these observations and emphasises their repetition over time. There
is no linear, positivist progress in history, but the social conditions of
production, for example the ownership of the means of production
or the exploitation of workers, are constants in the renewal of trends
and movements – as can be seen in history, from the rapid destitution
of the Lyon silk weavers at the start of the nineteenth century to
collapsed textile factories in today’s Bangladesh. For Marx (and
Friedrich Engels) both dialectical materialism as episteme and his-
torical materialism as philosophy of history constituted economy as
the anatomy of society, and this meant that rational and measurable
facts must support speculation on emancipated social forms and also
their cultural representation.4